Gail Lumet Buckley: Lena Horne’s Daughter

Gail Lumet Buckley is Lena Horne’s daughter. The news that 92 year old Lena Horne passed away had to be hard on Lena’s family and friends. Read more about Horne’s death and her daughter here.

Meet Gail Lumet Buckley, also known as Gail Horne Jones. Gail was born on December 21, 1937 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to parents Lena Horne (famous singer and actress) and Louis Jordan Jones (a successful publisher).

After graduating from high school in 1955, Buckley chose Harvard as her college of choice to pursue French. Buckley kept active in college by participating in the Harvard Dramatic Club. The summer after her second year of college, she went on to work on a newspaper for a resort in the Catskills. It was the next summer that Gail did public relations work for Air France.

Her career jobs would include work for Marie Claire magazine, an attempt at acting in a musical, a speech tour for John F. Kennedy and most fulfilling, a job with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students. Her job primarily consisted of serving as a mentor for black students looking to get into schools where mostly white people attended. Soon after, Buckley started a position with Life magazine that had her hooked. In the book The Hornes, one of two books she penned, she wrote about her love for working for Life magazine. She says, “It was the fulfillment of an earlier aspiration. I had always listed Edward R. Murrow and Dorothy Thompson as the public figures I most admired–two crusaders for truth and justice.”

Gail is known as a journalist and writer, whom once was married to film director Sidney Lumet. An important note is that she met her husband, whom was fourteen years older than her, at Life. Sidney had been married two times before. The couple married on November 23, 1963.

The couple went on to have two children together, daughter Amy born on November of 1964 and daughter Jenny in February of 1967, before divorcing in the 1970’s. The divorce is said to have occurred due to Buckley wanting to find more meaning in her life as during this particular time frame she was primarily a mother with no full-time career of her own. Although she enjoyed being a mother, she felt moving on from Lumet, getting therapy and focusing on her spiritual being was the right route for her to take. It was on October 1, 1983 that Gail married her second husband. Kevin Buckley was an editor and had the same passion for writing as she.

On May 10th, 2010 her famous mother Lena Horne passed away at the age of 92. Our thoughts go out to Lena Horne’s daughter Gail Lumet Buckley.

This entry was posted on May 10, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Celebrity Biographies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.